Populäre Geschichtsschreibung: Historiker, Verleger und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit (1848–1900) (review)

This book is a significant contribution to the history of German historiography. A good deal has been written about professional historians in the nineteenth century, and there is an important study by Andreas Daum on the popularization of the natural sciences in that period (Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert [Munich, 2002]). But so far there are none on popular historical writings, despite the fact that these were actually read much more widely than the works by academic historians. A sharp distinction has been made between increasingly professionalized historical studies at universities in the second half of the nineteenth century and historical writings from outside the universities. The former were considered to be Wissenschaft, which proceeded according to strict methodological guidelines, the other an “amateurish” (i.e., nonprofessional) enterprise which lacked this methodological basis. This assumed a clear difference between history as scholarship and as belles lettres. Nissen stresses that there never was such a sharp distinction, that scholarly history always took on a literary character and directed itself not only to scholarly, but also to popular audiences, and that popular history always contained a scholarly component. It is striking that Theodor Mommsen, the author of a scholarly history of Rome, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1902. It was only with the increasing trend to specialization in the last decades of the nineteenth century that a portion of historical studies sacrificed this literary dimension and, in doing so, lost much of their broader audience.

Nissen rejects the notion of an ahistorical eighteenth century, and stresses how Enlightenment historians paved the way away from biblical theological notions to philosophy and history as guides to understanding the world. He assigns a key role in the growth of historical consciousness to the Bildungsbürgertum, but is aware that with universal alphabetization and the increasing accessibility of lending libraries, readers from the lower middle and working classes also turned to historical literature. He rejects the academic historians’ claim to objectivity and points to the ideological bias of their commitment to fulfill a national mission. Until Bismarck completed the unification of Germany under Prussia, the majority of (at least Protestant) historians, with the notable exception of the conservative and Europe-oriented Leopold von Ranke, tended to be liberal nationalists questioning the status quo; after that they ardently supported Otto von Bismarck’s semiautocratic Prussian Hohenzollern solution. In their writings they focused narrowly on politics, and adamantly rejected most historical writings produced outside the university, not only on scholarly but also on ideological grounds. Heinrich von Sybel, who in 1859 founded the Historische Zeitschrift, which became the key organ of the academic profession, called, on the one hand, for political relevance; on the other, he found no place for Catholic, socialist, or, for that matter, democratically oriented historians, or for cultural history. But as Nissen points out, outside the universities all of these diverse political tendencies, as well as cultural history (Kulturgeschichte), played a significant role.

To substantiate this conclusion, Nissen applies an empirical method that, in many cases, relies on statistical analyses. Popular historians, unlike historians at universities, addressed themselves to a broad audience and thus were greatly dependent on the book market and the changing preferences of the reading public. Nissen examines the number of books published by individual authors, as well as the number of editions of their works. But because of the high price of books—markedly higher than in England or France—many potential readers, even of the elevated social classes (not to speak of the lower middle and working classes), could not afford them.

It is a strong point of the book that Nissen does not see German developments in isolation, but compares them with those in France, Great Britain, and the United States. There were many more personal libraries in French than in German homes. While personal ownership in Germany was lower than in these countries, the use of libraries...